Monetizing A Website For An Affiliate Income

Believe it or not you might of seen some affiliate sites without actually knowing that they are selling other people’s products rather than their own. What we would do in this section is find one of these sites and explain exactly how these people make money. This way you will know just how monetizing a website for maximum returns does not need to be rocket science. The usual ways are either selling a digital product through an affiliate link, selling a physical product through an affiliate link, AdSense or even buying goods in bulk and selling them at a profit. We try to avoid doing the latter because it defeats the object of affiliate marketing and you also incur the expense of holding stock.

Unfortunately gone are the days when we could create a very simple three or four page site with very little content and a big buy it now button. These days Google is looking for websites to provide quality information to the people that are looking for it. But we will try and do is find a site that is doing things well, ranking and more than likely converting. Please note that none of the sites are ours and we have only found them through a little searching on Google.

First of all I went to clickbank and looked for a product range. Then I found lots selling plans on how to make your own electricity through building your own solar panel systems.

I searched for “how to build your own solar power system” a fairly low searched for term, around 50 views per month I believe. However, the way we need to look at this one is that it is a keyword where the site exactly meets the needs of the person searching.

This is when I came across the following url at No2 (No1 was a youtube video).

Example Of Monetizing A Website

When I looked at the site to the trained eye you can see straight away it is an affiliate site. There is a fair bit of content on the website targeting different keywords for creating your own energy.

On the top left of the website there is a space to enter an email address to get their “newsletter” which of course are going to be a bit “saley”. That said I personally feel there is a time and a place to join a list and when you are looking for products such as how to make green energy then unless they are offering you a reason to join the list people don’t just join.

In the top center there is a massive great AdSense ad, below this there is a decent amount of content with a few more AdSense ads thrown in. You should note that Adsense is not the only way to place ads on a website. I found a post on adding lots of ways to monetize a website, while I dont agree with everything in it, you can see for yourself how people draw incomes even from blogs.

For the energy site it is pretty well optimized if a little ugly, Alt texts on images etc etc. what you should know it is also that the page is not optimized for the keyword that I typed in however Google has made its own mind up that it is best suited for that search term. Hence the importance of targeting LSI’s in your linking.

After 20 seconds there was a pop-up which actually leads to a click bank product. These are proven to actually be quite helpful however never ever set a pop-up to come on instantly assume someone lands on the site or your bounce rate will be through the roof.

On the side bar he has a social sharing plug-in and we can see at this stage it has 12 Facebook likes, a few Google plus ones and 67 interest pins. It is not phenomenal amount of social sharing however it does show Google that there is some interest through social circles for this website. Of course the chances are many of these will of been generated by the site owner.

It should also be noted that the author has a relevant authorship account linked to the website. While it is not a major ranking factor is certainly one of the 200+ factors that should be taken into account.

One of the main things you should notice is that when I did a quick analysis of the back links through open site Explorer there are quite a few links, mainly branded and no exact match anchor texts for things like “build your own solar panel”. But, there are High PR links (by this I mean links on pages with PR). There are many ways to do this which we will be covering later on in the training. One thing to remember is that PR breeds PR, the site has a high PR through a pretty scrappy link profile but some high PR links, many of which are branded to the green optimist and raw url links.

How Is The Affiliate Site Generating Income

The site has quite a few ways of generating income for its owner, its not a perfect example but I am sure it is an example which pays. Probably with very little work other than a little maintenance. One of the main things that people need to remember is that affiliate marketing is a business so you do need to take into account a form of profit and loss when working out whether to tackle a niche. There is always going to be some level of cost involved in creating your site whether it is in time or outsourcing money. However you need to work out how much it’s going to cost to maintain the site at a high position. Whether that be actively seeking links on a monthly basis or just drip feeding a few links to keep Google happy. While this will not cost a fortune there is a cost whether it is your time or someone else’s.

One of the things it should be noted about this website is that the AdSense costs are pretty good. For search term such as “how to build your own solar panel system” the cost per click is $2.25 per click. This means the AdSense advertiser will get half of that. My guess would be that the majority of the income from this website comes from AdSense rather than through the sale of kickback products. However I am sure that the product does convert to a few sales in month at $38 in commission each time.

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